Some aspects of mother-child relationships following the birth of twins

Abstract

In the outline of a research program on the process through which mothers of twins begin to make a differentiation between their children and succeed or do not succeed in individualizing each of them, we have undertaken a preliminary study to get closer to the psychological and social questions mothers have to face in the first weeks after the birth. We followed up five triads mother-twins at the maternity unit and at home for the first three months. The observations of children's behaviour, babies’ material environment, and of mother's behaviour as well as mothers interviews have brought evidence of the complexity and specificity of such a situation. We have shown that the overloading of the nursing tasks obliges the mother to adopt a precise organization in which she cares not to favour one of the twins to the detriment of the other. Furthermore the mothers feel they will never be able to satisfy each child fully, despite those true “egalitarian strategies”. To those behaviours which consist of “doing the same thing” with both babies, an individualized representation of each child opposes itself very early in the mother's speech. This lag between the differentiating maternal representation and the maternal behaviour that tends to cancel such a differentiation allows us to suppose there exists a double process: the necessity of individualizing the twins and the desire to confound them in one unit.